Let's review the beginning and end of this old coin's new shout.
Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow
The Uptober market in October belongs not only to the lively new memes on Binance but also to some long-forgotten old coins.
In the industry, these old coins are referred to as "Dino Coins," indicating those mature tokens that pioneered certain sectors but whose initial popularity has gradually faded.
For example, ZEC (Zcash) surged from around $53 at the end of September to $230 a week after the National Day, with a monthly increase of over 370%. The revival of old coins was not driven by institutional buying or technological upgrades; the direct catalyst came from a tweet.
On October 1, legendary Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant, with 2.9 million followers, made a highly controversial statement on the X platform: "Bitcoin is insurance against fiat currency, while Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin."
Subsequently, ZEC quickly rose, and other privacy coins also experienced a long-awaited increase in value due to the overflow of sentiment. The long-silent narrative of privacy suddenly became a hot topic again.
If you missed this wave of ZEC's increase, let's review the beginning and end of this old coin's new shout together, to see how significant the influence of big names can be and what opportunities in the privacy sector are worth paying attention to next.
Conflicts of Interest, Old Coin's New Shout
Naval Ravikant is a well-known name in the Silicon Valley investment circle. As a co-founder of AngelList, he built this $4 billion startup financing platform.
His personal investment track record is also impressive, having invested early in over 200 companies, including Uber and Twitter.
In the crypto space, Naval's credentials are equally strong. In 2014, he co-founded MetaStable Capital, one of the earliest crypto hedge funds. According to public reports, the fund achieved a 540% return in 2017, with early holdings including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other crypto assets.
On October 1, Naval tweeted that Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin, followed by a series of tweets arguing that Bitcoin lacks privacy, pointing out that Bitcoin's public ledger makes it impossible for "Satoshi Nakamoto himself to use Bitcoin" without revealing his identity, and that governments/banks can track all transactions through chain analysis.
Zcash can serve as a complement to Bitcoin rather than a competitor, using zero-knowledge proofs to hide key information such as the sender, receiver, and amount.
The problem is that these benefits of Zcash are not new; it feels more like a big name's casual shout for an old coin, as the related privacy narrative has been long forgotten.
From the timeline, Naval's tweet coincided perfectly with ZEC's explosive rise. However, Naval may not be entirely neutral, as there are unspoken conflicts of interest involved.
Multiple public reports reveal that as early as 2015, Naval invested $715,000 in a company called Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which later changed its name to Electric Coin Company, the very entity that developed Zcash.
Additionally, Naval previously served as a board member of the Zcash Foundation, giving him some influence over governance decisions.
As a result, this level of investment mogul making an old coin's new shout has drawn criticism from the community, suggesting that he is leveraging his influence to boost an early investment portfolio project, making it hard to believe this is a neutral technical discussion or investment advice.
Interestingly, Naval has remained silent on these criticisms, neither confirming nor denying them.
Regardless of the controversy, Naval's influence is clearly reflected in the price. His tweet garnered 2.9 million views, triggering a series of KOLs to follow suit. Balaji Srinivasan (former a16z CTO), Mert Mumtaz (Helius CEO), and others published supportive posts for privacy coins, further amplifying market sentiment.
The end result was that ZEC rose from $53 at the end of September to $230, with an increase of over 300% since he tweeted.
Sentiment Overflow, Chain Reaction in the Privacy Sector
Naval's shout not only boosted ZEC but also spread sentiment across the entire privacy coin sector in recent days.
Railgun (RAIL) became the biggest dark horse. This relatively niche privacy coin surged 240% during the same period, rising from $1.79 to a peak of $4.83. The 24-hour trading volume skyrocketed by 1270%.
In addition to the sentiment overflow from ZEC, Railgun also had other catalytic events.
On October 9, the Ethereum Foundation released the Kohaku privacy roadmap, specifically mentioning the integration of Railgun's zk-multisig technology, which is one of the privacy features that Vitalik has always favored.
Moreover, other privacy coins also experienced significant increases.
During ZEC's explosive rise, Grayscale also announced the reopening of its Zcash Trust for private placement.
Grayscale Trust is a compliant channel for traditional funds to enter the cryptocurrency market. Although it is not as popular as Bitcoin and Ethereum trusts, it is significant for ZEC, as it is one of the few ways institutional funds can hold ZEC compliantly.
From the official data, it can be seen that the current assets under management (AUM) of the Zcash Trust have reached about $85 million, with the share price increasing by 340% over the past six months.
With these messages released simultaneously, the market began to pay attention to the privacy sector again. Although it is difficult to fully quantify the specific inflow of funds, the increase in social heat is very intuitive.
In addition to the tokens mentioned above, there are other projects that may also benefit from this wave of short-term sentiment driven by the privacy narrative.
- Aster: Dark Pools and Privacy Trading
The popularity of Aster needs no elaboration, but few people pay attention to its dark pool model.
As an on-chain Perp DEX, one of its highlights is the "Hidden Orders" feature. It allows the size, price, and direction of orders to be completely invisible before execution, only confirming the result on-chain after the transaction. This mechanism protects traders from MEV attacks, front-running, and liquidation sniping through zero-knowledge proofs.
Amid the meme frenzy on Binance and the overlapping privacy narrative, $ASTER itself may still be worth watching.
- Umbra: Auditable Privacy
From October 6-8, the Solana privacy protocol Umbra conducted an ICO on the MetaDAO's futarchy platform, originally aiming to raise $750,000 but ultimately raising about $8.8 million, over 1100% of the target.
Umbra's core value lies in providing "stealth mode" for Solana: through device-side encryption and Arcium's multi-party computation (MPC) technology, users can conduct private transfers without sacrificing the verifiability and speed of the blockchain.
Unlike the completely anonymous Monero, Umbra has a built-in compliance framework that creates encrypted links between private and public wallets through an auditor program, disclosing information only under court orders. This auditable privacy meets users' needs for financial privacy while avoiding regulatory risks like those associated with Tornado Cash.
Currently, related privacy projects on Solana are in the early stages compared to Ethereum. Solana has always been known for its speed and performance, and moving towards privacy will inevitably require support from some leading projects.
Public information indicates that Umbra is set to launch on the mainnet in Q1 2026. If all goes well, it may attract professional traders in the Solana ecosystem who need to prevent front-running, users requiring bank-level confidentiality, and institutions seeking compliant privacy tools.
It is worth mentioning that MetaDAO, which provided the financing platform for Umbra, has seen its own token META increase by about 191% in the past 30 days, which is another topic related to the launchpad mechanism and will not be elaborated on due to space constraints.
- Ethereum Foundation Kohaku Roadmap: Privacy from the Margins to the Core
On October 8, the Ethereum Foundation officially released the Kohaku privacy roadmap, marking the first time in Ethereum's history that privacy has been elevated from "optional feature" to "protocol-level commitment." Kohaku is a modular open-source SDK (software development kit) that provides privacy primitives for wallets, allowing developers to easily integrate strong cryptographic features. This move is personally endorsed by Vitalik Buterin and has established a 47-member Privacy Cluster team to coordinate cross-organizational work.
Core features include:
Light Clients: In-browser verification to avoid trusting RPC nodes that may leak IP addresses
Private Transaction Flow: Integration of zk-based protocols like Railgun for confidential sending/receiving
Social Recovery: Tools like ZK Email and ZKpassport allow wallet recovery without exposing private keys
dApp Single Account: Isolation of transaction records across different applications to prevent correlation analysis
This is not about reinventing the wheel, but rather integrating existing mature privacy solutions (such as Railgun and Elusiv) into a unified SDK to lower the development threshold. Ethereum plans to showcase the initial prototype at Devcon in November 2025 and promote native account abstraction (AA) in 2026, making privacy a "default option" rather than an advanced feature.
The Kohaku roadmap specifically mentions Railgun's zk-multisig functionality. As the "officially recognized" privacy engine, Railgun will gain broader wallet integration through the Kohaku SDK, which is also one of the important catalysts for the 270% surge of the RAIL token on October 9.
More broadly, Kohaku represents a fundamental shift in Ethereum's attitude towards privacy, and privacy tokens on Ethereum may experience a wave of short-term speculation.
- Aztec Mainnet Launching Soon: Telling the Story of L2 Privacy and Decentralization
Aztec Network is an Ethereum-based privacy-first zero-knowledge rollup L2 that has raised $119.1 million (led by a16z and Paradigm), focusing on "programmable privacy," allowing developers to build applications where users control data disclosure.
On September 17, 2025, Aztec deployed the 2.0.3 fully functional upgrade, which means that all mechanisms required for the mainnet are now in place.
The core difference between Aztec and other privacy solutions lies in "computational privacy": it not only hides transaction amounts and addresses but also conceals the entire contract execution logic. This paves the way for enterprise adoption.
For example, tokenized assets (RWA) can be settled on-chain without exposing trading strategies, meeting KYC/AML requirements through selective disclosure.
The Aztec roadmap indicates that the mainnet Alpha will launch by the end of 2025, utilizing fully decentralized sequencers and validators, without a transitional phase of gradual decentralization.
This contrasts with most L2s, such as Optimism, which initially still have centralized sequencers, and other L2s that have made some compromises regarding the centralization of sequencers.
While infrastructure is not a new narrative, the entire crypto market may not necessarily need new L1/L2 solutions. However, having a unique selling point in an old sector still has the potential to attract some attention and funding.
Overall, most of these projects are still in the early stages, but the privacy sector is indeed growing from a marginal demand to an essential option in mainstream on-chain infrastructure, and localized opportunities may exist within this quiet transformation.
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